The Reign of Andrew Jackson eBook

JACKSON THE FRONTIERSMAN

Among the thousands of stout-hearted British subjects
who decided to try their fortune in the Western World
after the signing of the Peace of Paris in 1763 was
one Andrew Jackson, a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian of
the tenant class, sprung from a family long resident
in or near the quaint town of Carrickfergus, on the
northern coast of Ireland, close by the newer and
more progressive city of Belfast.

With Jackson went his wife and two infant sons, a
brother-in-law, and two neighbors with their families,
who thus made up a typical eighteenth-century emigrant
group. Arrived at Charleston, the travelers fitted
themselves out for an overland journey, awaited a
stretch of favorable weather, and set off for the Waxhaw
settlement, one hundred and eighty miles to the northwest,
where numbers of their kinsmen and countrymen were
already established. There the Jacksons were
received with open arms by the family of a second brother-in-law,
who had migrated a few years earlier and who now had
a comfortable log house and a good-sized clearing.

The settlement lay on the banks of the upper Catawba,
near the junction of that stream with Waxhaw Creek;
and as it occupied a fertile oasis in a vast waste
of pine woods, it was for decades largely cut off
from touch with the outside world. The settlement
was situated, too, partly in North Carolina and partly
in South Carolina, so that in the pre-Revolutionary
days many of the inhabitants hardly knew, or cared
to know, in which of the two provinces they dwelt.

Upon their arrival Jackson’s friends bought
land on the creek and within the bounds of the settlement.
Jackson himself was too poor, however, to do this,
and accordingly took up a claim six miles distant
on another little stream known as Twelve-mile Creek.
Here, in the fall of 1765, he built a small cabin,
and during the winter he cleared five or six acres
of ground. The next year he was able to raise
enough corn, vegetables, and pork to keep his little
household from want. The tract thus occupied
cannot be positively identified, but it lay in what
is now Union County, North Carolina, a few miles from
Monroe, the county seat.

Then came tragedy of a sort in which frontier history
abounds. In the midst of his efforts to hew out
a home and a future for those who were dear to him
the father sickened and died, in March, 1767, at the
early age of twenty-nine, less than two years after
his arrival at the settlement. Tradition says
that his death was the result of a rupture suffered
in attempting to move a heavy log, and that it was
so sudden that the distracted wife had no opportunity
to seek aid from the distant neighbors. When
at last the news got abroad, sympathy and assistance
were lavished in true frontier fashion. Borne
in a rude farm wagon, the remains were taken to the
Waxhaw burying ground and were interred in a spot
which tradition, but tradition only, is able today
to point out.